It has straight lands and grooves in the barrel. As it does not twist it is not rifling so not a rifle, it is not smooth so it is not smooth-bore. This seems dumb as hell, as it totally unstabilized so is 5 MOA with a range of 50 yards.

In a practical sense, it is stupid as hell and overpriced. You can build a budget pistol from assorted parts at under 500 and a good one for under 1000 if you know what you're doing and benefits from it being a rifled barrel.

I think in this case, this gun would only work if states recognized that it is a "firearm" and not a rifle in any legal sense

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The thing that I am most interested with about this gun is nothing to with the gun itself (which IMHO is pretty useless). With the precedent that straight lands a grooves do not count as rifling or smoothbore, I think you could have some very interesting short barrelled semi auto .410 firearms. Am I correct in thinking that the only requirement for a weapon like this would be for it to have an OAL of over 26 inches?

In the past I believe that one of the derringer companies tried this straight rifling before for .410 pistols, but were told it didn't count as rifling so wasn't legally a pistol so was an NFA item. I get a bit lost with the US "Any Other Weapons" class, but is that what this derringer would have been? Are these "firearm" non-rifle, non-shotgun, non-pistol grey area guns only legal if they have an overall length of over 26" inches?

Yeah, with your .410 idea since it isn't a smoothbore it isn't a shotgun, so you don't need to worry about putting a stock on it to get the OAL over 26in turning it back into a shotgun (smoothbore + less than 18in barrel + manufactured with a stock (the gun somehow remembers this) + shotgun gauge = SBS, smoothbore + less than 18in barrel + not manufactured with a stock, even if same model + shotgun gauge = AOW unless you stick an arm brace on it to get the length to over 26in without it being a stock, in which case it falls into a category simply called "firearm:" in something like 12 gauge it dodges becoming a destructive device due to the fact that it fires a shotgun cartridge even though it is legally not a shotgun).

The 26 inch length isn't exact because the AOW category being dodged is weapons that are "readily concealable:" history suggests 26in is the minimum length before the ATF start getting their nope on.

Basically NFA and GCA were laws assembled by monkeys.

Last edited by Evil Tim; 01-26-2018 at 12:01 AM.
Reason: Several alterations made due to the needlessly confusing law being hard to successfully put into English

Yeah, with your .410 idea since it isn't a smoothbore it isn't a shotgun, so you don't need to worry about putting a stock on it to get the OAL over 26in turning it back into a shotgun (smoothbore + less than 18in barrel + manufactured with a stock (the gun somehow remembers this) + shotgun gauge = SBS, smoothbore + less than 18in barrel + not manufactured with a stock, even if same model + shotgun gauge = AOW unless you stick an arm brace on it to get the length to over 26in without it being a stock, in which case it falls into a category simply called "firearm:" in something like 12 gauge it dodges becoming a destructive device due to the fact that it fires a shotgun cartridge even though it is legally not a shotgun).

The 26 inch length isn't exact because the AOW category being dodged is weapons that are "readily concealable:" history suggests 26in is the minimum length before the ATF start getting their nope on.

Basically NFA and GCA were laws assembled by monkeys.

So what if I were to have a Remington 870 with a 14 inch barrel with straight cut groove rifling like the Reformation......

Not smoothbore and so not a shotgun, not rifled and so not a rifle, fires a shotgun cartridge and so not a DD. It will get AOW'd unless you can make the OAL 12 inches longer than the barrel.

The big thing that changes is that since adding a stock won't make it a shotgun as it would with a smoothbore that fires a shotgun cartridge (and therefore get it dinged as an SBS on barrel length alone) you don't need to use an arm brace for the "not a stock" length bonus.

The thing that I am unsure of with a 12 gauge using this system is the fact that it is over .50 cal. There is generally an exemption for shotguns that use this round, but the problem in this case is that the whole point of the grooves is to make this weapon legally not a shotgun so I don't see how it falls under that exemption. It fires the same round, but the wording of the exemption uses the term "shotgun", so not one of these things. It probably isn't a problem as Fostech got away with that "firearm" version of the Origin 12 (not a shotgun by definition as it used an arm brace so not designed for firing from the shoulder), but it seems to me that these 12 gauge "firearms" are on kind of thin ice.

Something that just occurred to me, I believe this straight lands and grooves thing was tried a while ago with .45/.410 pistols but it was nixed by the ATF (trying to solve a different problem to this use), but the point is if it has already been done by somebody can Franklin file a patent on it? Their argument is that unlike the historic use of black powder firearms their system is patented as it uses metallic cartridges, but this is not new as it has already been done with shotgun (and by extension .45 LC) rounds. I think there have also been shotguns in the past that used straight rifling on the theory that it stops the wad from spinning producing a more consistent pattern. Incidentally, the inability to use straight rifling lead to these derringers having an incredibly slow twist to the rifling that only covers about 1 inch of the barrel but that is enough apparently (there is no minimum rifling standard by the ATF, it just needs to have some degree of twist).

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